Un­ravel Two

There’s a lot of heart in Un­ravel Two. there’s some real love and thought and com­pas­sion seep­ing out of it and that’s to be com­mended. it’s a game that ramps up rather nicely as the var­i­ous mean­ings of be­ing a char­ac­ter made of yarn and all of the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and strengths that comes to em­body it are re­vealed and made ap­par­ent. it’s a game that should be a real tear­jerker by its con­clu­sion. But it didn’t quite hit us that hard.

so, as we con­cluded the four or so hours of Un­ravel Two, we were left won­der­ing what was miss­ing? the game has made sig­nif­i­cant strides for­ward from its fore­bear with much im­proved plat­form­ing be­ing the big­gest change. the game feels tighter and more con­trolled than be­fore, which is good. it also looks fan­tas­tic with some great level de­sign and that same dense, rich feel to the world. Many of the lev­els are also set ei­ther at night or in darker ar­eas, which de­spite the bright, hope­ful feel of the game over­all, ac­tu­ally works re­ally well. it brings a lit­tle edge and threat that the orig­i­nal game was sorely lack­ing.

and there’s tan­dem char­ac­ter/co-op game­play, which is a wel­come ad­di­tion too. it brings a whole new di­men­sion to the puz­zle plat­form­ing as you can ei­ther con­trol each yarn char­ac­ter with a friend or switch be­tween them man­u­ally on your own. Ei­ther way works re­ally well, as think­ing about the right place to put each char­ac­ter and how you can use the link of yarn be­tween them can be a nice head-scratcher. there is, how­ever, no real mind-bog­glers in there. the pace of the game seem­ingly tak­ing prece­dence over any chal­lenge in the story cam­paign.

and other than an un­her­alded and sharp dif­fi­culty spike in the last cou­ple of chap­ters, the real test comes from the 20 chal­lenge lev­els, with a new set open­ing up ev­ery cou­ple of chap­ters. these are gen­uinely dif­fi­cult, re­quir­ing good tim­ing of your swings, but also a lot of im­pro­vi­sa­tion, as you won’t al­ways know what comes next or where you’re head­ing.

But still, some­thing is miss­ing and in essence it’s that there’s some­thing slightly safe about the ex­pe­ri­ence. the at­ten­tion to de­tail and the use of a back­ground story through­out of two kids es­cap­ing to­gether speaks to a real pas­sion and depth of feel­ing in the game-mak­ers, but like a piece of art out­side a multi­na­tional bank, there’s an air of the ar­ti­fi­cial about it. We feel rather harsh say­ing so, but its beats feel so sim­i­lar to Jour­ney and Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons that it feels like a solid homage more than some­thing stand­ing on its own terms. For some­thing light and en­joy­able, we would cer­tainly rec­om­mend it, but don’t ex­pect this one to reach down and re­ally grab a hold of your soul.

VER­DICT 7/10 A Fine con­tin­u­a­tion on the orig­i­nal’s Prom­ise

Above: There’s a mood­ier edge to pro­ceed­ings in Un­ravel Two and we like the shift as it brings some much needed dark­ness to con­trast with the cute Yarny char­ac­ters. A threat ap­pears to hang in the air even if it never re­ally ar­rives.

Above: As you play through the game you’ll see a story play out in smoky out­lines of kids run­ning away from adults. How much im­pact you’re hav­ing or how much is just a mem­ory is left to you to fig­ure out.